A cop killer from Ellis County may be the next Texas inmate to be executed — and could be the last for a while amid a state shortage of the drug used in lethal injections.

Kent Sprouse, 42, was sent to death row for a 2002 shootout at a Ferris convenience store that killed police Officer Harry Steinfeldt III and Pedro Moreno, whom Sprouse had asked for help repairing his car.

Steinfeldt, 28, was an Army veteran who served in Bosnia. At the time of his death, his wife was five months’ pregnant with the couple’s first child. Moreno was a truck driver and father of three; a native of Mexico, he became a U.S. citizen when he was married.

Sprouse’s execution could be the state’s last for a while, at least until Texas can obtain more of the lethal drug pentobarbital, which compounding pharmacies are reluctant to provide, or find an alternative drug.

“We’re exploring all options, including the continued use of pentobarbital as well as other possible drugs,” said Jason Clark with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. “At this time I can’t speculate on the future use of drugs.”

The state’s last dose of pentobarbital would have been used Wednesday on 55-year-old Randall Wayne Mays of Henderson County, according to The Associated Press. But Mays won a reprieve late Monday.

In addition to Sprouse, there are three more executions scheduled for April and it is unclear whether or not they will be delayed.

Sgt. Curfey Henderson, a supervisor at the Dallas County jail, testified for the defense today that Thomas – housed in administrative segregation because of his criminal charges – tends to keep to himself and seems to be well acclimated with the jail routine.

“You can tell a person has been inside for so long, that they know not to cause any problems,” Henderson testified. “I’ve never had him raise his voice or anything.”

Before he was transferred to the Dallas County Jail in 2010, Thomas served time in a Texas Department of Criminal Justice facility.

A former TDCJ property officer testified earlier this week that her staff recovered from Thomas’ cell a purple book with two razor blades hidden inside. They also confiscated a diagram with instructions how to convert a radio and a pair of headphones into a communication device, the former officer testified.

But he won a new punishment phase of his trial in 2010 because the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that previous jurors could not properly consider whether Thomas’ mental abilities should result in the lesser sentence.

Thomas’ defense attorneys hope to sway jurors to vote for a life sentence. They plan to argue that Thomas’ low intelligence, brain damage and mental illness mean he shouldn’t be executed for killing the Finches. Prosecutors are again seeking a death sentence.

The Dallas County medical examiner’s office concluded in 1986 that both Mildred and Fred Finch died because of multiple stab wounds, said Dr. Edward McDonough, who conducted Mildred Finch’s autopsy.

During the testimony, prosecutors presented to the jury graphic images of the wounds on their bodies. Some of the jurors winced when they saw the photos.

Mildred Finch had between 80 and 90 stab wounds, and Fred Finch had 21 wounds, said McDonough, who is now an assistant medical examiner for the state of Delaware.

“Any or all of those wounds could be fatal,” McDonough said.

Authorities did not recover a weapon from the crime scene, but medical examiners testified Friday that the stab wounds appear to be from a single-edged blade.

Jury selection is underway today for a hearing to determine whether a man is competent to stand trial in a death penalty case.

Defense attorneys are expected to argue that Kenneth Wayne Thomas is mentally retarded and does not understand the legal proceedings.

Dallas County prosecutors believe Thomas, 53, is competent.

Thomas was convicted in separate trials of killing attorney Fred Finch and his wife, math professor, Mildred Finch. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered a new punishment hearing in 2010

If a jury finds Thomas competent, the punishment hearing would begin later this week.

Another jury, which has already been selected, will then determine whether Thomas is sentenced to death or life without parole.

After the first trial, prosecutors leaded that one of the jurors was on probation for felony theft. Fearing the courts would overturn the conviction in 66-year-old Fred Finch’s death, the district attorney’s office tried Thomas for the slaying of Mildred Finch, 64, who taught at El Centro Community College.

Thomas stabbed Fred Finch 20 times and Mildred Finch 80 times while burglarizing their South Dallas home in 1986 .

Thomas is borderline retarded, according to court records. He was born in the back seat of a car and the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. He had “significant” development delays and walk until age 2.

At 16, he was assaulted and pistol whipped at the park where he worked. He suffered an injury to the front of the right side of his brain.

He also has reduced impulse control that can result in violence, court records show. Medication could help.

The new punishment hearing was ordered because jurors could not previously consider whether low intelligence, brain damage, and mental illness should have resulted in a life sentence rather than death.

A previous prosecutor, George West, who is no longer with the district attorney’s office, said after a previous jury gave a death sentence: “This guy is Dallas’ Jason of (the movie) Friday The 13th, and it’s good society can be rid of him.”

Carrying signs such as “Texans against state killing” and “Thou shalt not kill,” about 24 members of different Christian denominations gathered in front of the Frank Crowley Courts building Wednesday morning to express opposition to the death penalty.

The event coincided with the 38th anniversary of Gregg v. Georgia, a landmark case in which the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty can be used as a form of retribution in murder cases.

Proponents of the death penalty have argued that it is justified in severe crimes and can help deter future crimes.

The botched execution of Clayton Lockett, convicted in Oklahoma of shooting a woman and burying her alive, has renewed the debate over lethal injection and the death penalty across the country.

“We thought lethal execution was a humane way to execute, but we’re learning that it can constitute cruel and unusual punishment as seen in the [Oklahoma] case,” said Hadi Jawad, who has been a human rights activist for more than 30 years.

Leaders representing eight churches from across North Texas read statements Wednesday about the death penalty from their congregations.

“The Ten Commandments teach, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ placing a profound respect for human life at the center of Jewish and Christian teachings,” said Rev. Ed Middleton, reading from the United Church of Christ’s “Call for the Abolition of the Death Penalty.”

Danna Pyke (left) and Leslie Harris were among about two dozen people protesting Texas' dealth penalty Wednesday morning near the Frank Crowley Courts Building on Commerce Street.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has rejected the latest petition from Lester Bower, the Grayson county man convicted of killing four people at an airplane hangar outside Sherman in in 1983.

Bower asked the court to review several issues, including actual innocence based on newly discovered evidence, a “Brady violation” claim that prosecutors withheld information, a claim that the jury failed to consider mitigating evidence of his character, and a claim that executing him after decades on death row amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

The appellate court denied the first three claims and dismissed the issue of whether long term incarceration on death row is cruel and unusual.

The botched execution of Clayton Lockett, convicted in Oklahoma of shooting a woman and burying her alive, has renewed the debate over lethal injection and the death penalty across the country.

Since Wednesday night’s botched execution of Clayton Lockett, the question in Texas has been, could what happened in Oklahoma happen here?

That’s a simple question with a complicated answer, it turns out.

On the surface, the answer is likely no. Here’s why:

Oklahoma and Texas, as of now, use different drugs.

While both states use lethal injection, Texas uses just one drug: pentobarbital, a sedative that when given in high doses can shut the body down, similar to the way it does in animal euthanasia, experts say.

Oklahoma used a three-step process that starts with a different sedative drug — midazolam — followed by a drug that’s meant to paralyze and a third that’s meant to stop the heart.

Since Texas doesn’t try induce cardiac arrest, it’s unlikely that a Texas inmate would suffer a heart attack while conscious like doctors say Lockett did. Even if the sedative failed and the inmate woke up, more drug would simply need to be given in order to execute, experts say.

But while the exact scenario in Oklahoma is unlikely to play out here, experts say there are other problems Texas could run into.

Consider the following:

Texas has the sedative Oklahoma used — midazolam — in stock.

Records provided by defense attorneys show that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has 30 vials of midazolam on hand that don’t expire until 2015.

TDCJ declined to comment about the specific drugs it has on hand, though a spokesman added that “our protocol calls for a single lethal dose of pentobarbital which we have used since 2012.”

But Texas’ drug of choice has become increasingly hard to come by recently as manufacturers, many based in Europe, stopped selling such substances to the U.S. prison systems because they oppose the death penalty.

Hypothetically speaking, if Texas ran out of pentobarbital, it could switch to another drug, including the one Oklahoma used. Ordinarily, we would know if this happened, but…

TDCJ is fighting to keep its lethal injection records secret.

The Texas attorney general’s office has previously ruled that TDCJ must make its drugs and suppliers public information. But TDCJ is in the middle of a legal battle to keep the records secret, arguing that making their supplier public puts that supplier at a safety risk.

While the lawsuits bounce between various courts, and the attorney general considers TDCJ’s latest request that its records not be subject to open records requests, TDCJ has been able to keep its supplier secret.

So as it stands, if TDCJ switched to a different drug, experts say the public may have no way of knowing.

“The decision to suddenly go undercover, go secret, means that if they prevail in that effort — and so far they have — we will have no idea if they decide to change drugs, if they decide to go to midazolam, which we know they have on hand,” said Maurie Levin, a lawyer who has spearheaded lethal injection litigation in Texas.

Defense attorneys argue this raises an eighth amendment issue. The eight amendment prohibits executions that are torturous or cause “cruel and unusual” punishment. Defense attorneys say if they don’t know who the supplier is and can’t verify the purity and dosing of the drug, they have no way of knowing if their client’s execution will violate the eighth amendment.

Levin says this secrecy is the “most overarching and important common ground” between Texas and Oklahoma.

“If we keep going down the path that TDCJ is taking us on, a path of secrecy, the question to ask is: how can we not end up where Oklahoma did?” she said.

***

Another question many people have is, is anything going to change in Texas because of what happened in Oklahoma?

Again, the answer appears to be no — for now.

TDCJ has no plans to change its execution procedures.

“TDCJ does not have plans to change its execution protocol based upon the Oklahoma incident. The Oklahoma incident does not appear to be related to the choice of drugs,” a spokesman said in a statement. Oklahoma officials have said there was an issue with Lockett’s vein.

The spokesman, Robert Hurst, said the state’s next execution — scheduled for Robert Capmbell May 13 — is still on schedule.

And top state officials have supported TDCJ, saying Texas’ protocols would prevent something similar from happening here.

Sen. Wendy Davis, Abbott’s Democratic rival in the race for governor, also said there was no need to review Texas procedure. “Senator Davis supports the death penalty and as governor will enforce it,” her office said in a statement.

Governor Rick Perry’s spokesman said the governor also had “great confidence” in the state’s criminal justice system.

***

It’s worth noting that there have been problems with other execution methods, not just the one used in Oklahoma. That includes compounded compounded pentobarbital, which Texas uses.

Here’s a sampling:

Staff writer Gromer Jeffers Jr. and The Associated Press contributed to this report. The slideshow was compiled based on Associated Press reports and the Death Penalty Information Center.

Update: The jury has not yet reached a verdict and will be sequestered overnight at a hotel.

The jurors will return to resume deliberations Saturday morning.

Original post: A Dallas County jury is deliberating the fate of a man who killed his children’s 16-year-old babysitter after she accused him of rape.

Jurors must decide whether Franklin Davis deserves a death sentence or life in prison without parole for killing Shania Gray in September 2012.

To make that determination, jurors must decide whether Davis is a future danger. If the answer is no, Davis, 31, gets a life sentence. If the answer is yes, jurors must consider whether there is anything that would mitigate Davis deserving a life sentence instead of death. If the answer is yes, he gets a life sentence. If the answer is no, Davis is sentenced to death.

Davis killed Shania after she accused him of sexual assaulting her at age 14 when she was babysitting his kids in Mesquite to prevent her from testifying at his trial the following month.

Davis testified during the guilt-innocence phase of his capital murder trial, saying that he picked up Shania from school in Carrollton and killed her because “her lies ruined my life.” He testified that he shot her twice and then stepped on her throat to stop her breathing at an Irving park.

He has repeatedly denied sexually assaulting Shania.

In closing arguments, prosecutors Brandon Birmingham, Russell Wilson, Glen Fitzmartin and Hector Garza said Davis’ past – including the murder of Shania, his repeated assaults of women and his assault of a guard when he escaped while in custody – show he is a future danger.

The case, Birmingham told jurors, is a simple one: “She told on him, so he executed her.”

Birmingham stood before jurors and recounted Davis’ past incidents, telling jurors repeatedly that if they thought Davis would not commit another act of violence, that he would follow the law and the rules, “you would have been wrong.”

Birmingham shook a small brown evidence box with yellow tape, saying “Shackles cannot hold him.” It’s not that Davis is strong enough to break them, he said. “It’s because he’s smart enough to manipulate the people who hold the key.”

Wyatt reminded jurors that Davis grew up in an “American urban nightmare” in violent, drug-ridden area of St. Louis where his mother neglected Davis and his siblings and his grandfather molested them. Davis’ mother was raped and murdered in 1997.

“It would have been better if those children had been raised by wolves,” Wyatt said. “Wolves protect their pups.”

Shania Gray’s mother, Sherry James, sat in the front row during deliberations with her arms crossed. She did not cry but her eyes appeared full of tears.

Before closing arguments, prosecutors called James as their final witness.

She told jurors, her voice full of emotion, that the when Davis escaped the sheriff’s custody while being treated at a hospital in December, she sat in her home, holding her son with the lights out. Her husband was at work.

“I was completely terrified,” she told jurors. She thought “he was going to kill me.”

James said she does not have the words to express how Shania’s death has impacted her.

“A babysitting job cost her her innocence. It cost her her life,” James said. “Her very first babysitting job.”

Shania’s brother is autistic and does not speak. He cannot express his loss or understand what happened to Shania, James said. He just knows she is gone.

Sometimes, James said that she plays videos on her phone of Shania singing for her son.

“He just kisses the phone,” James said. “That was his best friend.”

Prior to the murder, Davis called and texted Shania pretending to be a man named “D” and asked her about the alleged rapes. He testified that he was conducting his own investigation because he did not believe the police or attorneys were properly looking into the case. He recorded several of the phone conversations.

Davis also sent himself fake texts denying the sexual assault allegations that appeared to come from Shania’s phone.